Saturday, July 02, 2005

Saturday Quote: Leslie Marmon Silko

"It is very important how time is seen. The Pueblo people and the indigenous people of the Americas see time as round, not as a long linear string. If time is round, if time is an ocean, then something that happened 500 years ago may be quite immediate and real, whereas something inconsequential that happened an hour ago could be far away. Think of time as an ocean always moving. What is interesting to me about Einstein and post-Einsteinian physics and some of the discoveries in particle physics is what they have discovered about the nature of time. The curvature of time in space. So I grew up among people whose experience of time is a bit different. In their sense of time 500 years is not a far distance and that's why there is no need for the reinterpretation. That passage of time doesn't mean the same thing to us as it might mean in a culture where the people stretch the string out and say Oh, this was a long time ago. That is not the way my people experience time."--award-winning author Leslie Marmon Silko (1948-), in an interview with Thomas Irmer